TuringNYC

I'm trapped on Azure at work and we're constantly waiting for Azure pg to catch up with modernity.

For example, you cant use this: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/hybrid-search-in-postgresql-th...

Also for example, you dont get ultra-wide high dimensionality vectors.

It is nice they are open sourcing pg_durable, but how about adopting table stakes I'd get with AWS?

How do we know this is due to AI usage? Perhaps it is because the students missed key in-person learning at the tail end of high school due to the pandemic lock-downs? I cant imagine learning calculus / linear algebra on my own in high school.

>> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.

This is one of the worst parts of any concert, performance -- having a sea of phones in front of you recording. In a dark theatre, it is impossible to watch the actual performance when you have a screen on super-bright in front of you recording it. Also, some people literally record on ipads!

All these are reasons i've not opted to do "concert in my living room" via YouTube and a big screen tv. Not the same, but a lot less silliness around me.

>> That's why a web of trust was suggested. You keep track of who vouched for who and down weight those who vouch for users that prove to be bots.

Except eventually it will also weigh down those users who supported <XYZ political stance>

Similar! I think my experiences were best captured by the song SOFI TUKKER - Summer In New York

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCuSci5BSyQ

A lot of this went away, not sure why. People are too glued to phones.

When i was younger I would sometimes ride the F-train back and forth several times in the evenings just so I could think and put articulate thoughts into a notebook. This is before underground network connectivity, before smartphones, etc. The hum of the train was great and the speed of the F train at segments of Queens were exhilarating, a bit like listening to EDM while coding.

RIP. I absolutely loved the book A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life by J. Craig Venter.

>> Doubt this kind of workloads would agree to send data then to a cloud of randos devices,

Totally agree, which is why i said "I'd love a way to do this locally -- pool all the PCs in our own office for in-office pools of compute."

So true. The latest rage on IG is "this guy built a trading system on OpenClaw and is now making 10k, comment MONEY and i'll DM you the recipe."

No indy hedgefund algotrader gives away their golden goose, that would crowed out the trade.

It is much more work because for many workloads you have geographic ringfencing and cannot send it out to the cloud

I'd love a way to do this locally -- pool all the PCs in our own office for in-office pools of compute. Any suggestions from anyone? We currently run ollama but manually manage the pools

I can attest to this. Ultimately I dont think it is possible to 10x output systems with AI and actually keep the traditional quality controls (yet.)

IMHO you just need two stacks -- systems where you can play fast and loose and 10x output. And systems where quality matters where you can perhaps 1.5 or 2x. That is still a lot of output.

> In Motion is my favorite productivity track as well. Most of the time I just listen to the whole The Social Network soundtrack

I love hacker soundtracks too! I play the OST for Mr Robot and Halt and Catch Fire

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2MjjP5LxjyxA0Vvws3y...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSUs3adMQ8&list=PLrvyiZ4XwF...

>> I've had three main tracks that I've used for the past 8 months or so.

I've had several dozen songs (grown from ~5 in 1998) that I've used for almost 28yrs. They were originally mp3s, eventually cds, then apple music. I'm glad the artists have been getting royalties on the songs, i play them on loop sometimes for hours a day for decades on.

I play that song too while programming (along with several dozen others on a dedicated programming playlist). Eventually it goes into the background and just covers up outside noise. Some key moments are noticed -- i stop looking at my screen, repeat after the singer, and then go back to working five seconds later.

No idea if this is the case anymore, but many NY Public Libraries had "Stacks" where they kept lots of magazines going back to the 1970s. I havent checked for at least a decade, but that was a lot of fun -- we'd go there and look at old computer ads from the 1980s. They would have a binder per decade -- giant thick binders.

If you're willing to put up with the hassle, you could find them on Microfiche for sure. I've found newspapers from the 1700s in NYPL's microfiche archives https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/general-research-divisi...

I thought of OMNI before anything and was pleased to find it on the article :-)

Well you are lucky if you were able to dump the account. For me, I had Skype credit, monthly billings, and tons of contacts -- all gone in a botched post-merger integration. Definitely makes me never go back to that ecosystem ever again.

Ss it just me or did Microsoft never actually fix/figure out their account merge? I found that anyone who had a legacy skype/hotmail account basically got locked out once Skype/Hotmail/Outlook.com all merged. Multiple frustrated message threads online complained about this and from my personal experience it never got fixed. Basically two out of three accounts became inaccessable.

That was when I completely left that ecosystem, Office 365, everything. It was literally impossible to log in. Not surprisingly, the Office 365 bills continued to charge even though accounts were inaccessible. To this day, i'm far too scared to even attempt to use Azure on a personal account for this reason.

Thanks for the heartwarming story, loved it! Quite a nice change from all the depressing news otherwise.

Here is the letter if you want the primary source: https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/presentation/...

And if you dont want to read, here is the hourlong audio: https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry...

Those looking for a deep explanation, this isnt as much about AI as it is about societal participation in prosperity.

So many things wrong with this article.

>> The popular horse-switching fantasy answer is retraining. “Go back to school and become an engineer.” In theory, yes. In practice, rarely. The jump from an assembly-line worker to an engineer requires years of schooling and a different educational foundation.

Sure...and after "years of schooling" that work will also get taken by AI, since learning is accelerating. Remember 6yrs ago they told laid off people to learn to code? Then remember 3yrs ago they said to learn to prompt engineer. Unfortunately the tech moves faster than retraining for many.

>> So many things that we could do to help our customers.

Author assumes the customer is still in good shape. Not a great assumption, the value chain is being squeezed and disintermediated.

>> Which is why the idea that we’re somehow going to run out of work strikes me as absurd. It feels like a theory written by people who haven’t actually spent much time doing the work in the first place — serving customers, building products, and running businesses. There is always more that could be done.

Sure, there is always work. Not sure what the ROI is on the work though, is it worth paying someone to do? If so, why wasnt it done before?

The problems are so vast it is difficult to even describe to outsiders. For example, if I purchase a particular medication at a local pharmacy, it costs $25. However, my insurer mandates that I purchase it via their Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBM) Optum, which charges $125. Easy enough right, you price shop? Well then it doesnt count towards your deductible. The whole thing is an elaborate trap to not pay.

Sometimes it is easier to just pay cash without insurance altogether. You need the medication today and dont have two weeks to fight it out with letters and forms, then it definitely doesnt count towards your deductible (and also, what is the purpose of the pharmacy coverage insurance?)

>> watching the difference in a non-CS versus a CS person using an LLM is all you need to do to reaffirm belief that fundamentals are still a massive benefit, if not a requirement for the deeper software.

For now? I'm a CS grad. My son wants to be a CS grad. I'd like to believe what you wrote, and hope it is true. But at the current rate of LLM improvement, would this really be the case in 4yrs? Asking seriously as my son needs to choose a major in 4yrs.

>> For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.

Was this an initial screener or the final deciding interview? Also curious if you felt the async nature of an AI screener (if it was a screener) might be beneficial to some w/r/t timing (e.g., if I have a job, I wouldnt have time to interview during the day, so i'd prefer an async screener I can do at night or over the weekend.)

>> I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.

We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.

My FB feed is also people I dont follow. Not sure which brilliant PM came up with this idea, but if I wanted to see random content I could just go to a magazine or newspaper. I used to go to FB to actually see photos/updates from my friends and most people recognize we lost that several years ago. The second problem is just every third post being an ad. I deleted the app several years ago.

>> Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.

This sort of happens with Substack, albiet not as explicitly. People become "Founding Sponsors" or "Paid Subscribers" and they effectively subsidize it for everyone else because they appreciate the author's work and want the author to succeed. Authors often want to give away the content since it is indeed better if everyone can read it (as you note) -- but often cannot sustain it without a minimum set of sponsors.

I think you are speaking about this happening at the article level rather than publication level, which seems pretty hard since the readership would be fractured and long-tailed.